comfort foods

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Dinners This Week, Sick Food, Fall Crankiness

Of course, Carla ended up getting sick last week, so all my dinner plans went right out the window. (She is fine now, and also it was neither covid nor strep.) 

Should I even MAKE dinner plans this week? 

Well. I have a few things I can salvage from last week, and a few other ideas. 

Dinners for the Week of September 15-21

Okay. So there’s that sorted. 

Clearly, when someone gets sick around here, the dinner plans go straight out the window. I am very easy to throw off track, I guess. No, wait. I am super flexible when plans change. There, that’s more palatable. My husband and I just end up eating random stuff around the house – which can sometimes include cereal or yogurt. Carla had a pretty decent appetite despite her cold, so she ate things she normally eats (roasted salmon, chicken nuggets, meatballs, bagel with cream cheese). 

Whenever I’m sick, my mom suggests making chicken noodle soup. To her, that’s the ultimate sick food. 

I do remember eating Campbell’s chicken soup when I was a kid, and enjoying it. But as an adult, it doesn’t do anything for me. When I’m under the weather but still able to eat, I usually go for carbs: toast with butter, bagels with butter, baked potatoes with butter. 

Carla will not eat soup, full stop. For her, sick foods typically look like… popsicles. Otherwise, she eats pretty much what she always eats.

My husband likes a bowl of matzah ball soup when he’s feeling rotten. I do not know how to make matzah ball soup; fortunately, there are a few places I can get it as takeout. 

What do you eat when you’re sick? Do you find chicken noodle soup as restorative as my mom does?

In other news, it still feels like summer outside, but it looks like fall. The thing is, I am feeling Extremely Cranky about fall this year. I don’t even know why! I have such a bad attitude. This weekend, my husband and I spent an afternoon by and in the pool – it feels like one of our last opportunities to enjoy it, and the summer didn’t afford as many pool days as I’d hoped – and I tried to take in the beauty of the changing leaves and the scrubbed-clean sky. 

And yet I am so very grumpy. Some of the grouchiness seems to be related to the impending holidays, I think. My family has four birthdays coming up and Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukkah, and I am not looking forward to ANY of it. In fact, the other day I asked my husband if we could maybe tell the family that we aren’t doing gifts this year. We could get presents for Carla and my niece, I conceded. But no one else. I don’t know how that will go over, in a family that has Gift Giving as a love language. Who knows. Maybe the grumpiness will subside? 

I really wish I could just get over this feeling. Is there a way to turn things around? I’m being Actively Grateful, which is the only strategy I can think of. Maybe I just need to ride it out. 

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Dinners This Week

I made a second batch of pumpkin bread this morning. Second batch in a week, I should specify. The first batch went wrong somehow and resulted in a very stodgy, goopy mess that I threw away after exchanging multiple Paul Hollywood quips with my husband.

Today’s batch is better. I mean, it’s not going to win any beauty pageants. (Why doesn’t it ever RISE?) And it was still slightly stodgy, which I don’t understand. (Okay, I didn’t leave it in for the full 65 to 75 minutes the recipe suggests, but when I checked at sixty minutes, the toothpicks came out clean! That should mean DONE and NO STODGE!)

Stodginess aside, it tastes wonderful. Bonus, my house smells wonderfully of cinnamon and cloves and pumpkin.

Speaking of pumpkin… It’s making its way into the menu again this week. You should be aware that I don’t really like pumpkin. Pumpkin bread – okay, and maybe a smattering of other pumpkin desserts – is the lone exception. But my husband suggested it, and then he suggested another pumpkin recipe when I wasn’t properly enthusiastic about the first one, and a) I try to accept his dinner suggestions because I want to encourage him to help me with the Sisyphean task of coming up with meals to eat day in, day out, every day, day after day, until death, and b) he clearly is in a pumpkin frame of mind, so why not feed that craving?

My range of expressions as I go through the Pumpkin Stages of Acceptance. P.S. I look nothing at all like Kristen Wiig.

This week is supposed to be damp and cooler if not cool, so I am going all out with the hearty meals. 

Dinners for the Week of September 23-30

  • Chicken Shawarma with Steamed Broccoli: We haven’t had this old favorite in awhile; it will be good this week.
  • Beef with Sugar Snap Peas: I’m just in the mood for this?? Feels like it bridges the gap between “fresh and summery” and “nourishing and warm” pretty well. I might throw in a red bell pepper if I’m feeling fancy.
  • Apple Cider Glazed Pork Chops with Green Beans: This is a recipe that I used to make ALL the time… and yet I can find no record of it on my blog! Has it really been THAT long since I’ve made it? Well. Time to fix that. 
  • Ground Beef Tacos: My daughter is having a friend sleep over this weekend; the last time she slept over, she was deeply disappointed that we didn’t have tacos for dinner, which was what I’d served the previous time she’d been over. This time, I will make tacos once again. It’s really a gift for all of us.

What’s on your menu plan for this week?

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Chicken Paprikas

This is one of my favorite cold-weather recipes. It’s also what I consider to be peak comfort food. (Kari wrote recently about comfort food, and got me thinking about what I turn to when I need to nourish my body and my soul.) Paprikas is right up there. It’s creamy, spicy, hearty, and warming. Plus, it’s very, very easy.

(I recognize that for a lot of people, the instant that you say “dice an onion” a recipe ceases to be “easy.” But if you are not a big onion dicer, you can usually find pre-diced onion at the grocery store in the convenience foods section, so please don’t let the presence of a diced onion deter you from trying this.)

One of the things I love about this recipe is that it is very flexible. Have leftover chicken from dinner last night? Use that. Only have frozen chicken thighs? Use that. Want to see if bell peppers would be good? Toss some in with the onion. Have two pounds of chicken breast instead of one? Great. Have one potato instead of two? Super. Have an extra half-cup of chicken stock lying around? Add it right in. No sour cream, but you have Greek yogurt? Excellent, that works too. Don’t like spice? Don’t use hot paprika. Don’t have a potato but you have some frozen diced hash browns? Those would probably be great. Use less or more sour cream. Use less or more flour. Use a potato or don’t. This recipe is very adjustable and always delicious. It’s also amazing as leftovers, and I am not a person who particularly relishes leftoevers.

It is, however, not particularly photogenic.

Chicken Paprikas (adapted from Joy of Cooking)

Serves 6-8 people

Ingredients

1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast, cooked or not*, diced, shredded, or not

1 Tbsp vegetable oil or butter or a combination of both

1 white onion, diced

2 large baking potatoes, peeled and diced (optional but highly recommended)

4 cups low-sodium chicken stock

2-4 Tbsp paprika (any combination of sweet or hot paprika you like)

1 tsp salt

Cayenne pepper, to taste (optional)

8-16 oz sour cream, light or full fat

2-4 Tbsp flour**

1 package egg noodles

Instructions

  1. Add oil/butter to the bottom of a large pot. Turn stove to medium and add diced onion once the butter has melted.
  2. Saute the onions gently until they are translucent.
  3. Add paprika and salt to the onions and stir until the onions are well coated.
  4. Add chicken stock and chicken and bring to a boil. Reduce to simmer and cook for 15 minutes or until chicken is cooked through. (You can skip this step if your chicken is already cooked.)
  5. Prepare egg noodles according to package instructions.
  6. If using chicken breasts, remove from broth and shred; return shredded meat to pot.
  7. Peel and dice potatoes, then add to the pot.
  8. Cook for 15 minutes more.
  9. During the last 10 minutes of cooking, add flour to sour cream and whisk until completely incorporated.
  10. Ladle 3-5 spoonfuls of broth into the sour cream/flour mixture and whisk to temper. Do this three times, then add sour cream and broth mixture back to pot, stirring to incorporate. Cook for five more minutes.
  11. Add salt and cayenne to taste.
  12. Spoon paprikas over egg noodles (maybe with a dollop of sour cream/Greek yogurt on top?) and enjoy.

* This works great with shredded rotisserie chicken, which you can buy in bulk from Costco.

** The flour is purely for thickening, so you could probably use cornstarch instead or just skip it entirely. This can be quite soupy without the flour, though. Honestly, it can be quite soupy even with the flour; you will probably have to play with your sour cream to flour ratio a bit to get it perfect. If you like a thick sauce, I would err on the side of more flour than less. You can also squish some of the potatoes so that they add to the thickness of the soup.